Paperback: 74 pagesPublisher: Rain Mountain Press; First edition (August 4, 2014)
Available for pre-order
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0989705153
ISBN-13: 978-0989705158
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Reviewed by g emil reutter
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The poet Andrew Kaufman has attempted to capture paradise and jail in a series of 47 sonnets compiled in The Complete Cinnamon Bay Sonnets. Kaufman sets the stage in the prologue with his poem Two Hours After My Brother Called. The poem is set in Central Booking of the NYPD in Manhattan where he is incarcerated for interfering in an arrest. In vivid detail he describes the holding tank and environment with a loneliness and as boisterous as he sounds, a fear. He deals with his condition through an imaginary brother until his father arrives to bail him out.
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The sonnets in this collection are haunted by this experience even as he writes of his paradise, the Virgin Islands, handcuffs, beat downs haunt him through each poem. Each of these sonnets captures theatrical drama and the use of this form speaks not only to the patience of the poet but to his craft.
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He leaves us in Sonnet # 47, last two stanzas
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These forty plus poems leave me free
to return, thoughtless as a tourist
to the air and sun. But then it starts
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again, the blankness careening toward fear
and want that are treacherous as damp scree,
as I slog through the slush and mud of March.
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In this collection the poet leaves us with an appreciation of the air and sun, (freedom), and an awareness of the slush and mud of the world.
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You can check out the book here: http://www.amazon.com/The-Complete-Cinnamon-Bay-Sonnets/dp/0989705153
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-g emil reutter lives and writes in the Fox Chase neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pa. (USA).http://gereutter.wordpress.com/
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